Talks to Freshman Girls Part 2

How reading should help writing is a question. I have heard it said that a professional writer should read some other more excellent writer one hour a day! How far we should take another writer for master is very doubtful. Said a Michigan man to Mr. Emerson, as he came out from a lecture, "Mr. Emerson, I see you never learned to write from a book." It goes without saying that we want only original, first-hand work from our writer; nevertheless, it is true that he may learn something about his art from nearly every book he reads. You yourselves are observing readers; observe, among other things, how the thing is done.

Beyond and out of college, the educated woman should live pen in hand.

Power of expression is power itself, and expression with the pen will add much to a woman's efficiency as a member of society. With many business careers opening to her, success depends not a little on the ability to write an admirable business letter. Her usefulness as a secretary hangs on the efficiency of her pen. A teacher's letter of application often settles her fate. The librarian will introduce books to readers all the more effectively if she hold the pen of the ready writer. The college woman should be valuable in many branches of journalism. In philanthropic work, occasions arise for wise, tactful, brief, effective composition, in letters, reports, and public addresses.

The pen is not enough used in preparation for speaking. We should be spared many a rambling discourse if the orator had first submitted to its discipline.

The club paper has a place in many women's lives. Few of them take it seriously enough. If they have possession of an hour's time of fifty women, they should give their utmost as an equivalent for fifty hours of human life. To make her club paper worth while, a woman should have lived pen in hand for a year, reading, thinking, taking notes. The paper of the educated woman should be reasoned, ordered, and shapely, while every sentence should have its meaning. As John Synge said of a play: "Every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or an apple." This is not the club paper of the lady who rises with smiling apology, "I have had very little time to prepare this paper. I really did not begin to write it until night before last."

Whether women desire it or not, they are destined to take more and more part in public life, and whatever they may be called upon to do, they will find that "Have it in writing" is one of the best maxims of the great world they are entering.

I would, however, have you first regard the use of the pen in letter-writing, in preserving the unity and love of the family, in cheris.h.i.+ng friends.h.i.+p, in sweetening human intercourse. It makes society of solitude for the lonely woman, or for the invalid, or for the aged.

Reading and writing together are proof against loneliness.

By all means, use the pen as a means of efficiency and of happiness, but I would even cultivate writing for writing's sake. I would dabble in it as an amateur! It is worth while to draw and sketch for the training of the eye, and for the greater appreciation of others' work. Write, and you will be a far better reader. You help to create a literary atmosphere in which some one else can write better than without you, as musicians say that an orchestra must have players in the audience.

Writers need the understanding reader. We have not yet in our country a large enough body of eager, expectant readers, of literary sympathies.

Moreover, it seems a law of Nature that, if many are writing and keenly interested in literature, out of such an environment a great writer is sure in time to emerge.

By writing you may discover yourself. The call may come to you, and nothing then can stop you. You will say, like Carlyle, "Had I but two potatoes in the world and one true idea, I should hold it my duty to part with one potato for pen and ink, and live upon the other till I got it written."

The woman of letters is a type sure to develop from the present intellectual training of women. Such a vocation should not take her apart from the great experiences of womanhood: these should but make her the better writer. Her career of writer will be a higher education in itself, a steady intellectual and moral development. I urge you to write because it will hold you to the ideal; it will develop the philosophic mind; it will stimulate character and intellect. It opens vistas of happiness, as the practice of every art does. To know the joys of the creative artist one needs not to write a novel or a drama. He can know them from a letter, happily written, or even from a fortunate phrase that has come to him.

Whether or not such writing bring you fame and money, it will have given you something no one can take away from you. The modest person of a quiet mind who does her best and thinks not much about the consequences, this person shares some of the sweets of authors.h.i.+p with those she knows to be her betters. The perquisites of the writer are many: the good society; the sympathy, sometimes the love, of strangers; the mysterious and fascinating communication with one's fellow-men.

People ask why college women have not distinguished themselves in literature. Colleges for women began as our great literary period in America was drawing to a close. If women have not been notable in our literature in the last fifty years, neither have we had another Emerson or Hawthorne. American intellect has expressed itself in other and wonderful ways, but not in great poetry or prose.

Women have not yet had a long enough trial of education to be adjusted to the new conditions it has made for them. They have had culture sufficient to make them critical, but not creative; to make them modest and distrustful of their own work, but not greatly daring in any art.

They do small things delicately and delightfully, but the great works are still to come. Women need more power to the elbow. They need a richer tradition, and growth from a deeper soil; for a writer oftenest ripens through generations of readers and thinkers.

Do not let this discourage you. Each of us may in our day contribute to the progress of American literature; for we are helping to make the tastes and traditions out of which in a later generation a great poet may arise.

IV-EVERYDAY LIVING

The freshman girl is happy who, in her preparation for college, has included some knowledge of the art of living with others. Miss Ellen Emerson once read aloud to our Sunday-School cla.s.s an essay by Sir Arthur Helps on this very subject. One sentence I remember: "A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be a.s.sured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton's law is to astronomy."

Miss Ellen paused, and bade us not forget that saying. The girl who goes to college prepared to find people "different" has a mastery of the situation.

I would have a.s.signed her, as a piece of college preparation, a few good magazine articles about the United States, with three or four of the best new books about her country. These would make her glad to talk with a student from Oregon on her right and a girl from Boston on her left at that first homesick supper-time. She is, perhaps, a provincial New York City girl, who has never seen anything but Europe and her own town. Her horizon will at once widen at college.

Not that open-mindedness requires you to abandon your own beliefs.

College preparation should include Convictions. Truth and honesty there cannot be two opinions about; and in the art of living with others truth and honesty bear a great part. Said Oliver Cromwell, "Give me a man that hath principle-I know where to have him."

A girl should have had some preparation in business habits for living with others in college. Plain business honesty is a "college requirement." Borrowing is, I fear, one of the sins of student life.

Girls of your breeding do not borrow wearing apparel or personal belongings. But a borrowed postage stamp or a car-fare is a matter of business honor. So is punctuality; the robbery of other people's time is petty larceny. Integrity, uprightness, enter into the art of living with others, every hour of the day. The girl who is scrupulously delicate about other persons' rights and possessions is the girl you find easy to live with.

Teachableness is a charming quality in a freshman, in or out of cla.s.s: a little wonder and awe become her. A newcomer who "knows it all" is unbearable. Meekness is an old-fas.h.i.+oned virtue, not enough appreciated in these days. Yet who does not feel its charm in the una.s.suming woman, ready to learn, and to reverence superiority?

Prepare yourself to be at first of not much importance, to be outshone in recitation, to work hard without much recognition; but you will find soon that a teacher will grow to rely on you, will meet your eye, will welcome your response; and before you are aware, you and she will have laid the foundation of a lifelong sympathy and friends.h.i.+p. And, when all is said, the art of living with others is the art of making friends.

Do not forget your old friends. When you travel abroad, one of the most important subjects you learn about is America; when you go to college, you learn to know your home. The first ache of homesickness will teach you much. It would mean something very sad if you did not feel it. You would lose one of the tenderest experiences. When the pain softens, you find you understand your home and your dear ones as you never did before. That is the reward of the freshman's homesickness.

There will quickly come new interests, but do not become so absorbed in them as to lose this new relation to your home. Much as the friends there miss you, your college life may be made a constant pleasure to them. Let us hope that your "preparatory English" has made you a good letter-writer. Write clearly and legibly, with loving care, that your father may not say, "Am I wasting a college education on a girl that can't even spell?" and that your mother need not sigh, "There is a word I shall have to give up." The illiteracy of collegians of both s.e.xes I know to be a source of pain to parents who sit deciphering their letters by the evening lamp. It is all a question of your taking trouble, and of your thoughtful consideration for others.

Literacy attained, see that your letter gives pleasure, and that it share with your parents the fun and interest of your college life. See that it "make old hearts young." Don't send home a letter without a laugh in it. And pray write occasionally to an uncle or an aunt!

Do not drop your old acquaintance when you go away from home. Perhaps you have some humble village friends, to whom it seems a fine, romantic thing that you have "gone off to college." Every person whom you know may be in some way pleased and benefited by your experience. There are little girls who are examining you as only a little girl can, and are making up their minds whether they, too, will go to college some day.

When you see this bright child peering at you,-there is your chance to be something adorable!

No one follows you with more sympathy than the teachers who have fitted you for college. They have a share in you, remember; for teachers have a reward beyond money in the futures of their pupils.

We speak of college girls as if they had departed for the cloister; but reckoning by weeks, how large a proportion of their time is spent at home! In short vacations the unselfish mother plans all sorts of pleasures for her daughter, and perhaps says sadly at the end, "I saw little of Ruth. She made or received visits all the fortnight." The short vacations should, I think, belong to your parents: the summer gives time for other friends. Some day you will understand what it has cost your father and mother to send you out of their sight just as you have become most companionable to them.

In the case of some of you there are sacrifices made at home that you may go to college; and you will bravely share with your parents the "doing without" that is making your liberal education possible. Your social position in these next four years does not depend on money: it does depend on intellect and character; on taste, not expense, in dress and belongings; and on the traditions that you bring with you. "To him that hath shall be given." The girl who takes something to college gets more, as, when she travels, she gains in proportion to what she carries with her. For example, if you take to college the family tradition of reading, your college lot is a happier one.

The poor girl in college has certain advantages: she is respected for the effort she has made to get there; she at once excites the interest of her teachers; she finds herself in an atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement. She is generously praised, and is made happy by the appreciation of her gifts. Let her guard against vanity and priggishness. The poor and brilliant girl has her own temptations.

If she suffer in some things because of her poverty, it does not matter much. Privations, if they do not injure health, are bracing and tonic. A girl will learn at college, if anywhere, how to be rich though poor. She could be placed in no situation where she could more successfully ignore poverty. Simplicity in dress is "good form" in college. The fatal word "vulgar" is fixed by the initiated upon display, or extremes of fas.h.i.+on.

Taste and neatness are luxuries within the reach of girls of small means.

The rich girl has her difficulties. She is often handicapped by poor preparation, which is not so much the fault of her fitting school as of her social life too soon begun. She has had many distractions, with less serious labor of preparation. College routine will be at first irksome to her; but if she has chosen to go to college, she has stuff in her, and she can make of herself the finest type of student. Her money will be "means," and she will learn n.o.ble ways of spending it. Many is the rich girl who is secretly helping a poor girl to get her education.

Rich appointments make a girl's way harder at college, on the whole.

Scholars are distrustful of the appearances of wealth, sometimes unjustly. The wise college girl will cultivate simplicity, that she may be in harmony with her surroundings, and that she may have a free mind.

The girl of wealth may lack the element of the heroic and the romantic in the college career of the poor girl, but her compensations are that she can command all means of culture; she can travel, buy books, visit cities, and meet significant people. Her wealth buys her a wider life; while the girl of small means has one more concentrated and intense. Her pleasures may be keener because they are conquests; she relies on herself and develops her own resources. We will wait to judge the two until they are forty.

Health is one of your "college duties"; so is happiness.

"If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness,"-

wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a master of gallant living. He really had something to whine about, but he lived with all his colors flying.

However, I shall not deny that there are "blues" peculiar to college life. Occasionally they will be part of your education. There will be wounds to your vanity; and years afterwards you will remember the snub of some brusque, brilliant professor and will smile to think how much you learned by it. You will see another girl surpa.s.s you, and envy will give you a fit of the blues; for envy always punishes itself. The college has, on the whole, an atmosphere of n.o.ble feeling, of "admiration, hope, and love"; but a sin that some college girls have to fight is the ugly sin of envy. Jealousy is akin to it, and is sure to enter into narrow, intense friends.h.i.+ps. The remedy is many friends and many interests.

A genuine source of blues is disappointment in one's self. I wonder if you will believe an old college girl's experience that an occasional bracing failure is the best thing that can happen to you. It will help you to keep your balance, and to know yourself. Moreover, it will rouse you as nothing else will.

Trifles loom large in college life, its critics say. A freshman's world looks black to-day because of a bad recitation or a neglectful friend. I do not reason away her troubles: I only remind her of Abraham Lincoln's remedy for the blues (and he knew well what they were). "Remember," he said, "that they don't _last_." Also I would set her to some absorbing task: "work is good company," and compels her to think about what she is doing and not of her troubles.

It was recorded upon the tomb of a Roman lady long ago, "She made n.o.body sad." Make n.o.body sad with your woes, or your face, or your voice. And if you wish to cheer yourself, cheer somebody else. You very likely need rest for your nerves. College girls wear upon themselves and upon one another by too much talking. Their minds are so mutually stimulating that they need rest from their own company. One of the first conditions for a satisfactory intellectual life is a room to one's self. The college girl who cannot command it should spend much time alone out of doors, even if she carry with her a book.

When the college day is ended, and you look back over its hours, what will have made its success, and what will have made its happiness? Have you been "n.o.bly busy"? I leave to you the answer.

The Riverside Press